Water Bottle

I entered the classroom a little bored. Today we were revising a few things in order to prepare for the final exam and, even though I was a little worried about my recent productivity, I simply didn’t feel like listening to the teacher. She was really intelligent and I usually liked her lectures, but today, I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep. I want to clarify I was not depressed, I was just not in the mood.

The teacher was going through some themes that, she pointed out, might be appearing in the exam. I didn’t want to be rude and rolled my eyes in my mind. It’s not a sin to tell students which things to expect to find in the tests. Of course, if they did that, it would be easier to pass, knowing from the beginning the exact amount of info they required. But still, I hated how some teachers thought it correct to make their students memorize an entire semester. Most of the time, from a whole slideshow you would find one question whose only value was about three points out of a hundred.

I think it may have been because of the unusual amount of boredom, that the world decided to give a little twist in my life that day. It all started with a bottle of water.

I was trying to pay attention to one of the poems we talked about a few weeks earlier, but my mind kept drifting away from the screen. Our lecture hall was made to hold about a hundred students, but today there were no more than thirty. A girl had just arrived, making everybody turn to see her as she crossed the room, her face burning. She was half an hour late. Not that it mattered, that was the charm of lectures. You could enter or leave at any time and the lecturer wouldn’t care, after all, it was your choice if you wanted to learn or not. They were being paid to talk, even if nobody cared about the lecture.

The girl chose a seat a few rows in front of me and, as silently as she could, she took off her coat. It was snowing outside, so her hair was covered in little snowflakes, as well as her boots and clothes. I stared at her boots, mesmerized by the slow transformation of snow into water, due to the warmth of the room. In less than five minutes, most of the snow had disappeared and her feet were surrounded by a small pool of water. She didn’t seem to notice and was paying an extreme amount of attention to the teacher’s explanations. Her face was still red, slowly fading. She didn’t have to be ashamed, after all, the only one who was still paying attention to her was me, and that was because I was sleepy and in need of a distraction to keep me awake.

I pulled out my phone to check the hour. 10:50 am. Still, one more hour to go. I felt a yawn crawling up my throat and tried to cover it with my scarf. I didn’t want to be rude to the teacher. It was not her fault that I was dying of boredom here although her slow and monotonous voice was not helping. I blinked a few times to cast away the tears that had formed in my eyes, making my vision blurry. As my sight became clearer, I saw the girl in front of me pulling a bottle of water and opening it. I had forgotten mine at my dorm room, so I didn’t even have water to wash away the boredom. I saw her as she put the bottle on her lips and inclined it, making the liquid flow from it straight into her mouth. I could see the contractions of her throat as she drank. When she finished, she placed the lid on it and proceeded to put it in her bag again.

A few moments later, the coughing started. I could see her body spasm as she coughed, first quietly, as if trying to conceal the sound, and then louder and more desperate. Everyone was looking at her as her face turned red again. This time, though, it was not because of embarrassment, but because of the difficulty to breathe. She stood up and started heading for the door, all eyes on her movements. On her way, she stumbled and fell to her knees. Someone reached for her arm and pulled her up as the teacher asked if she was okay. I inhaled sharply as I thought of how ridiculous it was to ask such a question to somebody who clearly couldn’t respond.

I observed as the room became more and more chaotic. People started surrounding the girl like flies around a rotten apple. A few of them tried to help, but I got the feeling that most were just trying to get a better look. It was a morbid scene if you ask me, but I guess the class had turned out interesting. I stood up and walked towards her seat, where the bottle of water awaited, half inside her backpack. I took it and held it against one of the roof lights to have a better look. I could make out tiny shards of ice floating on the surface. They must have formed when she was heading to the room, due to the cold outside. It’s curious how water, when solid, floats instead of sinking. I put the bottle down and scanned the room. Many of the students were still trying to help the girl, patting her back and asking her to calm down. Even the teacher had pulled out her cell phone to call someone. Probably the First Response Team that our school had.

I noticed the teacher’s cup of coffee laying on her desk and reached for it. It was still warm. I headed toward the girl, asking my colleagues to move out of my way. When I arrived at her side, a guy was holding her with a paranoid look in his eyes. I could tell he was afraid and didn’t know what to do. The girl was on the verge of fainting and her lips had taken a purplish color. On one side of her mouth, a line of blood fell all the way to her chin, dripping and staining the floor. I looked at her and she tried to do the same, without much success because her eyes were barely open. I held the cup of coffee on her lips and asked her to drink.

A few people around me started protesting and calling me names. I insisted and poured the liquid down her throat. I heard her gulp and another round of coughs made her body shake. She splattered the floor with more blood and coffee, but when she drew breath, I could hear a collective sigh of relief around me. I stood up and headed to my seat as someone helped her to stand up. She was dizzy and immediately collapsed on a nearby chair, but the shard of ice had been taken care of. The coffee had melted it and nothing obstructed her throat anymore.

Slowly, everyone returned to their seats and I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. After a moment of quietness, the teacher cleared her throat and said that we could all go, that she would be sending everyone a presentation of what was going to be covered on the exam. I closed my laptop and shoved it inside my backpack. Once I had put on my coat, I headed outside to the next building. I still had a seminar to attend to. On my way, I saw a group of guys with a red cross painted over their big winter jackets entering the hall behind me. I smiled. I was no longer at risk of falling asleep anymore.